Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Summarize, as a last point, how you position vis-a-vis edX. When you go out to the world, how do you position MIT Professional Education versus edX?

Clara Piloto: I’m going to focus on the MOOCs that edX is doing. They’re doing a lot of really cool things. They’re also expanding into professional education. I’m going to make that comparison.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 4)

Clara Piloto: Corporate education is also growing quite a bit. We’re focusing on high-end quality experience for our corporate clients. That includes very customized programs in which we can provide different a la carte menu of experiences they’d like to bring in-house.

It might be something that’s off-the-shelf content that’s slightly self-paced. We can share that internally to hundreds and thousands of people. What we’re noticing is, people have problems they want to solve. They’re inviting us to the table to help them solve some of their problems.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who’s paying? Is it all companies paying?

Clara Piloto: It’s a combination. A lot of individuals are self-funding but there are a lot of companies that have tuition assistance. I believe the larger number is self-funding. 

Sramana Mitra: If you segment the different areas where you offer professional education in, what is the next level detail in each of them? I can imagine real estate is different in different countries. What are the region-specific nuances in the different segments that you describe?

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about structure? Is there anything specific in your structure that is particularly interesting?

Clara Piloto: I’ll start with in-person. We’re driven by learning-by-doing. Apart from theoretical classes, we also offer practical hands-on experience. It has to be applicable the next day in companies in your organization for it to be meaningful.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 1)

Clara discusses MIT’s professional education initiative that is run in an online-offline hybrid format.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as your work at MIT that is relevant to online education. 

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Are you saying that you have opened up your platform to software developers who want to augment your platform that you then offer to your 40,000 sites?

Greg Smith: Yes, we’re doing that. We have some people who have been doing that for quite some time. We are opening it up more and more to others. The other thing that is a great way for entrepreneurs to get started is to start with services.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 4)

Greg Smith: Another trend is the mass adoption of online learning. People
across all socio-economic demographics are going to online learning as the first place to look for things. It’s becoming more and more acceptable.

In fact all the marketplaces out there for online learning have helped build this trend. That is the pull behind the whole industry. If everyone is going online to learn, that creates this massive demand. That allows companies like us to go and say, “I’ve got something I want to teach these people. Let’s put it online.” I see that continuing to grow.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much of this is pure content subscription versus interactive tutoring or teaching? In 1M1M, we have a digital curriculum. Our basic program is a monthly subscription. In the premium, it’s an all-you-can-eat annual subscription. Additionally, in the premium program, we have online mentoring that goes with the asynchronous curriculum.